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Think in terms of what data is easily available to them via query for any domain...age is one of those datapoints.
Of course, in itself, it is meaningless, but that is why in terms of the overall Google 'regression' it is probably not weighted too highly.
This is exactly the point I was trying to make. We have noticed this "grandfather" effect by google on quite a few number of elder sites (1999 or older). I think its a bad policy to add that weight into the algo (even if the average website only has a life span 5 months or so). I would think fresh sites loaded with up-to-date information and coding techniques would be consider much more of an authority than the old horse and buggy sites of 1999...
Depends on the topic. An excellent site on the Peloponnesian War that has been up since 1997 would still be as relevant today. I suspect that what may look like the grandfather effect may just be an old site tends to pick up a lot of links over the years. Particularly with Google spidering blogs and such. The older a site is, the more of these sort of links it picks up.
Why? Well because I know people who have very old sites that haven't been updated in over six months to a year and they rank well for their keywords with fairly poor optimization.
... a page that has not changed for six months/years
is less likely to be a dynamically generated
spam page. One of the supposed weaknesses of the
last couple of months.
Until a couple days ago I would have agreed, but since our brand new Florida-hit-sites returned, I no longer see a corelation.
We tend to disagree. Perhaps you are not in as compedative a category where this "grandfather algo ingredient" may apply.
I give this theory some weight.
Why? Well because I know people who have very old sites that haven't been updated in over six months to a year and they rank well for their keywords with fairly poor optimization.
what you are saying here is that they ARE optimised. Post Florida means poor optimization is the new optimization. If you want to rank for 'big red widgets' you create a site for 'small white widgets' with a link to a site that sells 'big red widgets'.
Google starts with a clean slate every time there is a update, so i dont see any corelation.
This is not true, google simply makes modifications to its algo, typically most website's PR remains generally consistant(slight fluctuations of course, based on Google's new algo tweaks), and Google still has a history of a website's age stored within it's database to weight in as a heavy component of the ranking algo. (I hope I understood your statement correctly).
People if you are in a slighly compedative category, and have noticed a website(s) consistantly ranking higher than you with potenailly lower PR, little to no site updates, and little (if any) SEO, then please vist archive.org and check out the website's age. If it is 1999 or older, chances are it is part of Google's mysterious "Grandfather Effect", and potentially even worse, no matter how much high your PR/backlinks, and brilliant seo modifications, you make you will still remain in the shadows of this blind old geezer...
Perhaps I lose credability if i am wrong, but I believe PR is based relative to your old score in determining the new score.
[edited by: monsterisp at 3:49 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2004]
But i know Google dose remember to crawl pages even if you remove links to them. (I mean Google can crawl orphan pages, if it has already indexed the page previously)
but I seem to recall that Googleguy once said this isn't true
are we talking about the same GG who said make your site original, informative, stay away from any untoward SEO techniques and you'll be ok?
I have always felt that the older the site is the better it's chances of filter survival. I think it has something to do with being one of the first sites that a "new to the niche" / "jumping on the bandwagon" webmaster will go looking for back links and also link to because of it's placement for "add url" blue widgets.
edited to correct the english
[edited by: nileshkurhade at 5:48 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2004]
I feel filters are applied uniformly relative of the page age, which I think is not stored anywhere.
Your line of logic presented by your post is contradictory. How can you feel that a Google filter's application is relative to a page's age, if you also go on to say that you dont believe google even stores a page's age to begin with?
What i mean to say is that when filters are applied they dont take pages age into account.
A possible explanation to this seemingly Grandfather effect could be due to the "incremental indexing" which is the attempt of G to increase its index size in multitude. With incremental indexing, G has to divert a lot of its resources and bandwidth to crawl and index the web pages. With large bulk of new & old pages being crawled and indexed, G also need even more resources in calculating the PR iteration and link credit which have not been perfect at this time, thus resulting in * incomplete * or * inaccurate * PR iteration and giving link credit, especially to the new links and new sites.
In order to save its resources, G may not have to calculate the old links everytime since G already has their base factor. If this observation is true, it helps to explain why old websites with old links got more leverage than the new ones with new links.
This also helps to explain the phenomenon of "missing index page" which seem to occur with the newer sites - mostly less than a year old. PR is there, backlink also there, but link credit leverage is "not". Once the process is more or less complete which could take months, then there is a good chance that the index page return.
Age of the page has no effect on the ranking.
Lets end it here.
Age of the page has no effect on the ranking.
Page rank and positioning in the SERP is indeed done on a page by page basis. But that doesn't mean that one of the factors that determines a pages position in the SERPs isn't the domain from which it came. I've often wondered if among all the other variables there is a domain variable that can increase/decrease a page's weight.
IMO Google should take into account age of content in two ways.
(1) Older established domains that haven't received penalties should get some extra weight. The domains are in effect building up good credit rating. With domains coming and going, it's the ones that have lasted that were quality.By lasting, you have proven your quality in some measure.
(2) But freshness of content is more important than having a history of quality content. And so Google should also reward fresh content, which I think it does via the freshbot.
Reward fresh content on the page to give the most up-to-date results and reward a domain for having staying power (which is an indicator of quality).
